Raqib Shaw valuation
London painter, born in Calcutta and raised in Kashmir, of jewel-like paradises in enamel, glitter and rhinestones.
Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta in 1974 and grew up in Kashmir, where his family were merchants.
What a work by Raqib Shaw is worth
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Bio
Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta in 1974 and grew up in Kashmir, where his family were merchants. Political unrest drove the family to New Delhi in 1992, and he worked in the family business, among antiques, jewellery, carpets and fabrics, until 1998. A business trip to London in 1993 and a visit to the National Gallery convinced him to become a painter there, and he studied at Central Saint Martins from 1998, finishing his MA in 2002. His paintings, on birch panels and on paper, are crowded, opulent visions of imagined paradises and infernos, peopled by monkey kings, centaurs, demons, birds and armoured warriors, built from enamel, glitter and rhinestones in a painstaking technique close to cloisonné: industrial enamel is poured between raised outlines and worked with a porcupine quill. They draw on Bosch, Holbein, Antonello da Messina and other Old Masters as much as on Indian and Persian art, mythology and textiles, and he often appears in them himself, in his studio in Peckham, apart from the riot around him. He also makes sculpture in bronze.
The paintings are slow to make and relatively few, and the large panels are the most sought after. Their enamel and applied stones can crack, chip or come loose, and the panels are heavy, so they should be examined closely and moved by specialists. The date, the series and a provenance through Thaddaeus Ropac, which represents him, are the reference points.
Calcutta, Kashmir and Peckham
Self-portrait in the Study at Peckham (A Reverie after Antonello da Messina's Saint Jerome), of 2014, turns the Renaissance scholar in his study into the artist, blue-faced and laughing, among skeletons and ghouls.
Recent solo museum exhibitions include the Frist Art Museum in Nashville in 2023, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Huntington in San Marino in 2024, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.
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